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April 16, 2010

A Polish President Who Got in the Way

Memorial to the late President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski at the
Consulate-General of Poland in Sydney. Photo by alliance1911.

I was terribly shocked and saddened by the Polish leader's air crash -- to give you an idea of how I felt, my first instinct was to take a meatloaf I was wrapping up early in the morning over to the consulate on Madison Avenue, the way I would do to a neighbour with a death in the family -- before realizing that unwanted food in a diplomatic emergency would hardly be a help. So like a lot of people I just lit a candle to pray for the souls of the departed, and I gave myself some time to think about it.

I also distinctly remember how, in the Soviet era, the Soviets in Belarus had a clever propagandistic hustle going, where they would take tourists to Khatyn, a World War II site where 149 Soviet citizens were killed by Nazis -- tragedy enough -- to distract them from asking about Katyn, which was also nearby, site of the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers under Stalin -- manipulating one tragedy to blot out another in a village with a similar name. The reports about Katyn was in the Osobaya Papka, the Special File, and Gorbachev said he was going to fill in the "blank pages" of the historical record by opening up this file, but the Katyn story was rather late in coming out (although of course known in the West).

The insightful blog written by Paul Goble a day before the Polish air crash tragedy is likely going to be overlooked now. He recounts how an analyst describes Putin as distracting and diverting from the task of actually really apologizing for this atrocity and taking accountability for it. Instead, he dodged, saying that "the Russian people" did not commit the crime (nobody said they did) and made it seem as if all that mattered was a dubious moral equivalency that the "Russian state" suffered under Soviet communism, too and that Soviet soldiers died of starvation as Polish prisoners.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has received enormous and largely
uncritical international praise for taking part in the commemoration of
the Katyn tragedy and for allowing Andrzej Wajda’s film about the
Soviet execution of 22,000 Polish officers there in 1940 to be shown on
Russian television.

But a careful reading of his remarks, Boris
Sokolov suggests in an essay posted on Grani.ru today, shows that Putin
not only was unprepared to acknowledge many aspects of that horrific act
but openly lied about it to bring pressure on Poland to stop raising
the issue either bilaterally or internationally
(grani.ru/opinion/sokolov/m.176846.html).

You don't see that with the German government, somehow not accepting the inherited accountability of the Nazi past, despite obvious struggles at times in doing the right thing. The German government is constantly putting up memorials, making compensations, making arrests of neo-Nazis who are violent and coping with this historical burden. You do not hear them say "but it's not the German people," in part because whenever there are atrocities, it's always at least *some* of the country's people who are to blame for causing it and *some* to blame for doing nothing, but also because *the state* accepts that becoming the successor to a government also comes with a certain set of mandates to put things right. In fact, by the German state accepting accountability for the Holocaust, Germany ensures that Germansas individual people are not subjected to collective guilt.

I've already heard several New York intellectuals comment that it was so amazing that Putin showed Wajda's film, which was shown in the West years ago, on "the main TV channel in Russia". Not so. He *could have* done that and didn't; he showed it on the lesser-viewed channel, as Goble notes in quoting Sokolov:

The showing of Wajda’s film on Russian television was important and a
positive step, “although if the film had been shown on one of the two
main television channels [and not on a lesser one as was in fact the
case, although seldom reported], a great deal more people would have
learned the truth about Katyn.”

The other aspects of this tragedy that trouble me, from where I sit, is how the New York Times so callously headlined the obituaries. Anna Walentinowicz, who we always knew as a the brave worker who stepped out and began the Solidarity strikes, is referred to as a "Provocateur" in the headline: Anna Walentynowicz, Polish Provocateur who Spurred Communism's Fall, Dies at 80 -- as if this were a piece in Pravda of that era, and not the newspaper of record in a liberal democracy. Worse, the Polish president's obituary views him through the prism of EU annoyance, Kaczynski Often a Source of Tension Within EU evidently because he was for extending NATO's protection to Ukraine and Georgia.

His defense of those two countries often upset leading members of the
European Union, especially Germany, which was concerned that an expanded
NATO would make Russia feel threatened and lead to new East-West
tensions. Mr. Kaczynski, however, believed passionately that a strong
NATO would prevent Russia from reasserting its influence over Eastern
and Central Europe

I realize the New York Times is not my parish bulletin. It is not required to be respectful or laudatory of the dead in telling a news story. But these headlines feel to me as if they introduce a decided tone of bias. Communist secret police in Poland who were the real provocateurs called people like Anna participating in a legitimate trade union movement "provocateurs" -- is the Times tone deaf to these matters? I'm not a fan of NATO expansion, but I find it hard to crank up the sympathy for Russia's sense of threat, given its years of aggression against other countries and its own breakaway republics, and its retaliation against Georgia.

If the Times seems to be wishing Kaczynski into an early grave because his "star fading" and "he wasn't going to be elected anyway" as the obit concludes, wait until you see regnum.ru: "Ex-Foreign Minister of Latvia: After the Death of Polish President 'Everyone Sighed with Relief'". Whew.

Janis Jurkans, said to be an ethnic Pole, in an interview with the Russian-language newspaper Telegraf said the Polish president's death was a great symbol, because he crashed "right in the place where people are buried whose bones he exploited for his own political ends. Such is the hand of fate."

Kaczynski could have flown to Russia on the same plane as Prime Minister Donald Tusk and former president Lech Walesa several days earlier to the first ceremony, but didn't -- for political reasons, said Jurkans. He added that due to a conflict with the prime minister, a new plane for him had not been purchased, and there were other problems.

Jurkans also said, like the New York Times, that Kaczynski had no chance of being re-elected, because he "hung the pit of history on the country's neck" which is a mixed metaphor in Russian, too.

"Of course, it's a pity about him," said Jurkans. "But on the other hand, now everyone's breathing a sigh of relief -- the political arena is cleansed of populism with his departure". Kaczynski's death can even serve as a warning, said Jurkans "for our politicians who cling to history and prevent us from seeing the country in the future".

"Kaczynski was too contradictory a personality. He got in the way. Of the Poles, the Russians, and the Germans. Everybody," Jurkans concluded.

I know nothing about Polish politics, but I'm finding this Latvian's analysis ... creepy. What, you get a bit obsessed with the past, and your punishment should be death?! And then there's the idea that you can solve the problem of a politically unpopular leader who was going to lose the election anyway with a death; that populism is something 'you "cleanse" away; that you "can't" look back in the past (especially with something like that, which, even if 70 years ago, did involve a crime against humanity and the massacre of 20,000 people in cold blood which was never prosecuted; Stalin never had his Nuremberg).

As Sokolov concluded:

“in the course of the memorial ceremonies, no historic breakthrough on
the Katyn question in which Polish politicians and society had placed so
much hope in fact took place. Putin did not even hand over any new
declassified documents or declare that investigations would be
re-started.

Instead, even as Putin received plaudits from the
international media about his appearance, Russian officials refused to
hand over materials to Strasbourg, never once using the words “crime” or
“murder” to describe Katyn but preferring to talk about the shooting
there as “a case” or “the events in Katyn

And I also find it odd how few people, even an hour after the tragedy, were willing to ask the basic journalistic questions. Was it really foggy? Did the Russian police take journalists' cameras as rumoured? Why doesn't Smolensk have automatic landing devices? If weather is bad enough to make a recommendation not to land, why wouldn't it be a requirement that you must not land, an order to absolutely turn back? (I wish someone who knows air traffic control practices could explain that to me.)

We know that there was an incident during the war between Russia and Georgia where the Polish president flew to Georgia in solidarity -- or tried to -- and a pilot who said it was too dangerous to land was reprimanded. There's an assumption the same thing repeated in Smolensk -- but do we have actual taped voices on a black box or something to prove this? The Russians say in fact there weren't any voices indicating pressure on the pilot. The stitching together of this story is very neat and quick -- and that's most likely because it really did happen that it was foggy, that the plane was old, and that the pilot might have felt the stubborn president would want him to land because he was worried about arriving late to the event. Except...not so worried that he didn't come until three days after the initial event to which Tusk and the others came.

In his statement of condolences, President Medvedev repeated the word "sincere" twice to burn in the word given the skepticism that was certain to abound from Poles and others. I can only hope that the Poles get full cooperation and transparency from the Russians and that political expediency doesn't override any truths, large or small.

And I will continue to think of Vladimir Putin as needing to be accountable here -- for speaking the truth about Katyn and making a full apology, which he has not done; for serving as a symbol of the non-prosecuted Soviet legacy by the fact in his biography of his long years as a KGB officer; for shoddy airplanes sold to dependent satellites; for everything that strains Polish-Russian reasons for good reason, given the Soviet aggression of the past. Somebody should be.

Moreover, when did any leader of the US, Australia, France, Great Britain, Spain, or any other (excluding Germany, which had little choice but to apologize for the Holocaust)civilized country ever apologize for its atrocities, atrocities that make Katyn look like your average run-of-the-mill massacre? This is so selectively appalled that it nullifies itself.

I don't have to know anything about Latvian or Polish politics in detail (I only know of them broadly from reading the Times) to find the Latvian comments chilling and bloody-minded. I have a lot of questions about what it means to "get in the way" of the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans. In what? How? Maybe that's a good thing, if "getting in the way" means not caving to Russian bullying. I personally don't avidly support the expansion of NATO and don't see the point of adding Ukraine and Georgia when NATO/the U.S. have absolutely no intention or capacity to actually fight Russia on behalf of those two countries.

Even so, I can see that the solidarity that the Polish president might have felt for these two countries feeling threatened by Russia was a real political factor and one that may have had national and regional support. At least it got him elected, but maybe it couldn't keep him elected.

The Latvian sounds to me like he can't explain a) such a president with such positions in fact having popular support and getting elected b) the real threats Georgia and Ukraine experience. But that's because he's a Latvian, I guess. I imagine he values his own country's freedom!

Um, please do find for me a massacre or atrocity like Katyn that the U.S., Australia, etc. have committed. I don't know of any certainly of the U.S. on that scale. I've never heard of this way of distracting and downplaying Katyn -- complaining that the U.S. and other Western countries had committed massacres on this scale with this amount of deliberation and planning and viciousness (holding the people in prison for 2 years and then murdering them).

If you're going to go back to the era of the Spanish Inquisition, I would think that isn't really a fair debate, because then you'd have to look at all the wars and atrocities of the countries of Eurasia for this same time period.

If you're going to try to cook up one of those "Columbus genocide via smallpox" arguments, then I realize I'm not talking to a reasonable person, and since your an anonymous drive-by commenter, there isn't much purpose in discussing this seriously with you anyway.

Do try to find what you imagine to be an equivalent, actual or moral, to Katyn committed by the U.S.

For example, if you are going to cite the Trail of Tears expulsion of some 20,000 Cherokee and the deaths of at least 4,000 so we're told on Wikipedia in 1830 is then matched by any number of similar types of displacement and deaths of indigenous and minority peoples in the Soviet Union in modern times, such as the Crimean Tatars, whose population of 184,000 people were deported in 1944 from the Crimean peninsula to Central Asia, with about 50 percent of them dying along the way -- and that's the story of just one of the many "punished peoples" of the Soviet Union.

I don't understand why it is so difficult for people in the West to grasp that the horrors of the Soviet Union were far, far worse than anything you can come up with in the West. I wonder why it's even necessary to argue about these facts.

Thanks for a piece of great reading. Even though Kaczynski was a very controversial figure (both in Poland and abroad), it should not be forgotten that he has also played a major role in overthrowing the communism in the 80s. I personally have never supported him as a political leader yet still find it rather creepy that some 'sigh with relief' after the tragic news making it look like it was a totalitarian leader who lost his life that day.